Companies compete with each other and consumers benefit, but when there isn't competition -and only one company offers a particular service- countries look after their consumers' interests, and interfere and regulate the Monopolistic companies, making sure their services are kept within reasonable cost and quality.

What if you, as a company, can monopolize on a lucrative industry while avoiding costly governmental interference? What would be the best way to go about it?

AMD's war with Intel has been lost a long time ago, and the shape and direction of the company has been determined by its competitor whom have more use of it alive than dead. Now I'm seeing signs that Nvidia is also starting to have a predetermined advantage over AMD.

AMD vs Intel: AMD exits from chip manufacturing and buys from TSMC, whom are always one generation behind Intel. They can only focus on low-end, low profit products while Intel can sell newer, more powerful, smaller and cheaper products for a higher profit margin.

That means Intel makes the cake, eats %95 or higher of it, and feeds AMD enough just to barely keep it alive. AMD is acting as an independent branch of Intel that caters to a small market that Intel has no intention of entering. That's Monopoly while avoiding the regulatory restrictions of one.

AMD vs Nvidia: Both AMD and Nvidia purchase their chips from TSMC. Both companies seem to trade blows fairly, but for most of the year, many consumers as well as I were appalled to see that AMD manufactured power hungry video cards that do not match Nvidia's cards' performance, quite the opposite of what we're used to. Only to find out by the end of the product cycle that AMD's cards are more powerful, but due to non-optimized drivers did not show their true strength. Add in the overpricing in the beginning of the product cycle and you have a definite path to failure, or just willfully handing over the market share to your competitor.

What kind of idiot builds a V8 Cadillac and throws a wrench in the engine and charges %20 over its competition before selling it? Either AMD is that idiot or they are not allowed to sell a better product than Nvidia for most of the year. Maybe this Christmas is AMD's last hope of survival and if they don't sell enough, in the future they'll be purchasing older chips and selling sub $100 cards and leave the rest for Nvidia? I maybe exaggerating. The video card market isn't where the chip market is at the moment, but the signs show that it will be the same a few years from now.

Lastly I have nothing but respect for the AMD engineers who are still doing a great job under these circumstances. Lack of coordination between hardware and software engineers, and off-the-mark pricing of products are all business decision, not engineering ones.

SKYMTL

December 12, 2012 09:21 AM

So, this is going to be a somewhat long response but let me preface it by saying that I disagree with the lion's share of your points.

Quote:

What if you, as a company, can monopolize on a lucrative industry while avoiding costly governmental interference? What would be the best way to go about it?

See Apple's strategy. They basically hide behind the cloak of what should be bogus patents in order to game the system into granting them near-monopolies. THAT is the way companies go about it these days.

Quote:

AMD vs Intel: AMD exits from chip manufacturing and buys from TSMC, whom are always one generation behind Intel. They can only focus on low-end, low profit products while Intel can sell newer, more powerful, smaller and cheaper products for a higher profit margin.

That means Intel makes the cake, eats %95 or higher of it, and feeds AMD enough just to barely keep it alive. AMD is acting as an independent branch of Intel that caters to a small market that Intel has no intention of entering. That's Monopoly while avoiding the regulatory restrictions of one.

Intel got to where they are due to savvy business decisions and focusing on their core markets. Granted, there were a touch of bullying, which they ended up paying dearly for. On the other hand, AMD has been led by a successive string of lame-duck CEOs who didn't listen to their core management. As a result, they lost focus, ended up releasing several late or failed products (1st generation Phenom anyone?) and ultimately ended up falling behind the competition.

Personally, I liken Intel to a massive bus that doesn't change direction very easily but ends up leading the pack since it has a clearly defined game plan and has critical mass on its side. AMD on the other hand SHOULD have been that nimble little Fiat which can take corners and change direction like no one's business. It would have allowed them to better adapt to changing market conditions. That didn't happen. Instead, they tried to be Intel and look where that put them.

Ultimately, AMD's current position is their own fault. If there is a monopoly, it has come about because of AMD's failures rather than Intel's successes. Why should Intel be punished for that?

Quote:

AMD vs Nvidia: Both AMD and Nvidia purchase their chips from TSMC. Both companies seem to trade blows fairly, but for most of the year, many consumers as well as I were appalled to see that AMD manufactured power hungry video cards that do not match Nvidia's cards' performance, quite the opposite of what we're used to. Only to find out by the end of the product cycle that AMD's cards are more powerful, but due to non-optimized drivers did not show their true strength. Add in the overpricing in the beginning of the product cycle and you have a definite path to failure, or just willfully handing over the market share to your competitor.

There isn't any willingness towards failure here. I still contend that AMD is currently a half generation behind the competition. NVIDIA built in a boatload of GPGPU capabilities into Fermi and as a result, it became a stupidly hot running, power hungry monster. When compared against the HD 6000-series, which had comparatively very little compute backbone (ie: die space taken up by a massive cache, setup engines, etc) of course it looked inefficient.

Kepler is the first dual branch architecture which distinctly separates gaming / professional and compute brands (in this case GeForce / Quadro versus Tesla). This has allowed them to utilize a 28nm manufacturing process to create dedicated product stacks, ultimately lowering power consumption and increasing yields in mass market SKUs.

The HD7000 series meanwhile is going through the exact process which haunted Fermi: how do you build compute into your architecture? Well, by throwing die space at it! This isn't a failure in any way. It is a simple bout of growing pains which will lead to another subset of advantages in the upcoming Sea Islands architecture.

Quote:

What kind of idiot builds a V8 Cadillac and throws a wrench in the engine and charges %20 over its competition before selling it? Either AMD is that idiot or they are not allowed to sell a better product than Nvidia for most of the year. Maybe this Christmas is AMD's last hope of survival and if they don't sell enough, in the future they'll be purchasing older chips and selling sub $100 cards and leave the rest for Nvidia? I maybe exaggerating. The video card market isn't where the chip market is at the moment, but the signs show that it will be the same a few years from now.

You're looking at it the wrong way IMO. When the HD 7970 was released, it was expensive but at the same time, it was competitively priced at the NVIDIA cards which were available AT THE TIME. Companies can only price their products in relation to market conditions and that's exactly what AMD did.

There isn't some vast conspiracy going on here but there is a significant shift in the PC market. Product refresh cycles are being significantly lengthened which in effect leads to potential segmentation overlap. That royally screws early adopters but it effectively manages market conditions.

sf101

December 14, 2012 10:11 PM

I agree with some points from both of you.

Pricing wise the 7970 was competing with the 580 for about 6 months or so + 1 skymtl

But as most of us found out the moderatly clocked 7970 @ 925mhz almost certainly in all cases can run at 1100mhz without much of a hickup and most of all cards can run 1500mhz"mem" without issue , so why were they released at 1375? it never made any sense to me at all why they under performed their cards so much esp with a nvidia release on their heals. +1 luay.

Then the driver performance deal they had 6 months to iron out the kinks but only manage to do so months after getting their 925mhz stock clocked ect reference cards beat like a red headed step child by nvidias 680gtx with clocks that near its potential and more optimised driver's. only later to fix this issue and go.. see told you ours were better with the 12.11 drivers and the ghz edition cards releasing.

As far as the cpu side of things go they are coming along it would seem but amd is in dire need of die shrinks imho to compete in that market just financially not even performance wise i assume the later would come with the die shrinks myself.

I agree the ceo's seem to be exactly that "lame ducks" who respond to leading technology by trying to copy it.

They went after the compute industry of graphics cards like fly's to a pile of dung and it cost them in a way but now they have that technology there for the next gen if they wish to use it.

Right now the only thing AMD truely leads in esp in the public's eyes is on chip graphics unfortunately that side of the industry hasn't exactly cashed in.

I am hopeing the next amd/ati graphics card release is a pull all the stops type release run the card within 95% of its max potential and mature the drivers before release date. but its alot to hope for.

my 50cents.

elmorejohn46

December 22, 2012 04:25 PM

I think AMD competes very well against the GTX680 ,sure it needed more mature drivers but even when it was first released it did'nt lose by much when overclocked and most overclock pretty easy ,most benchmarks now have it winning with it's mature driver.It draws more power when heavly overclocked but so does the GTX-680.The GHz Edition and turbo editions compete very well at the momment.They have'nt had a super CPU in a long time,But they make pretty good sever chips real cheap.Plus the A-10 5800K Trinity has a good build in GPU ,for someone who just browses the web and can play games better then you would ever think a GPU build in to the CPU could.For a $120 chip it is pretty amazing a lot faster then the build in GPU on a 3770K .occourse if you are going with a good graphic card then you would want to go with a intel chip IMO.But AMD makes great low end products.